Summary

Daughter of Learner Blackman Saffell (1810-1874) and Sarah Alexander Wallace (1815-1884), of Blount Co., TN, and Watsonville, CA. (Sarah Alexander Wallace was herself the daughter of Capt. Wm. Wallace [1779-1853] and Mary [Polly] Chamberlain [1784-1844], both also of Blount Co.) Isabella first married Rev. Rufus Kendrick Scruggs (1837-1868) of TN, with whom she had two children. After his premature death, she moved, along with her children and parents to Watsonville, CA, sailing from NYC to Panama and, after crossing the isthmus by train, continuing by ship northward to her destination, San Francisco. In CA, she married Abram Wiley Rodgers, also from E. TN, with whom she had five more children. (He had first been married to Isabella's aunt, Mary Ellen Wallace, who died in 1867.) A merchant and shipper, Rodgers died in 1883 of yellow fever in Mazatlán, Mexico, while on a business trip. Isabella married for a third time to Col. Francis B. Hull, of Jackson, MS, in 1907. After the death of Rodgers, she had moved to San Francisco and become a teacher at the Irving Institute, a prestigious school for young women, and had also taught in the schools of Pacific Grove, in Monterey Co., where she maintained a residence as well. What is more, she had become a writer of travel literature and a publisher of textbooks of some note, and had worked with her son Harry A. Rodgers as an executive of his advertising firms in San Francisco and St. Louis, MO. While still living in Watsonville, she had also been nominated by the Democratic Party as a candidate for county superintendent of schools. Many researchers put her date of death at 1925, but CA and SF death and probate records seem to indicate she died in mid-June of 1927.